About this project

Council News Wire · Built by Jonathon Marsden · 536 councils + ACT Government · 8 state accounts · 89 region feeds

This project was born from a conversation with Chris Eddy. Chris runs LG News Roundup — a daily podcast and newsletter covering Australian local government news and opinion, and the best single source for keeping up with what's happening across the sector. If you work in or around local government, it's essential listening.

During one of our calls, Chris said: "Do you know what I really need? A site that scrapes all the council news from around Australia."

I'm Jonathon Marsden, a developer with a long interest in local government transparency — both as a technologist and former Mayor. I told Chris I'd build it.

Over six months I set up Bluesky bots for all eight states and territories — each one automatically publishing news from the councils in its jurisdiction. 536 of Australia's 538 councils, plus the ACT Government, which runs Canberra's local services itself. The two not covered, Pormpuraaw and Yarrabah, publish no news online that can be collected. This site brings those feeds together in one place.

Most people care about their own area more than a whole state, so there are also 89 region feeds on Bluesky — the M9 in Melbourne, Western Sydney, the Hunter, the Pilbara and more — and RSS feeds for every council, region and state, for readers and newsrooms that prefer them.

The bots run on my Rakali home-built server and publish to Bluesky. There's no editorial curation, no paywalls, no ads and no tracking — just raw council news as it happens, offered as a public good in the spirit of open access to information that affects people's lives.

Privacy. No cookies and no tracking across sites. We count use anonymously so we know which feeds are worth keeping: each day, how many people opened each feed, which site sent them here, and which reader app (such as Feedly) fetched an RSS feed. Each count uses a code that changes every day, so it can't follow you from one day to the next. We don't store IP addresses, account names or browser details, and our counts are deleted after three months. Pages are delivered through Cloudflare, and this site loads posts straight from Bluesky, so both see your connection as any web host would. Likes and follows on Bluesky are public, as they are for any Bluesky account. Links to council stories carry a tag that tells the council the visit came from these feeds.